Last year I broke down and bought a Dell PowerEdge T105 Server because it was relatively inexpensive and I needed a new Windows box at home. While it came out of the box with a modest Dual Core Opteron 1.8GHz cpu, I definitely wanted something faster in the future. Well the time came this week and I found the AMD Opteron 1224SE 3.2GHz on Newegg.com simply too good to pass up. At $115.99, the price is just right for an AMD based processor. This was an OEM processor, so it came as is, no heatsink or instructions included.

The PowerEdge T105 is pretty easy to upgrade. Since this was a processor upgrade, make sure your T105 Server has the latest BIOS update from Dell, if it needs it. Dell provides no documentation that I could find that the 1224SE is supported or not, so I had to gamble that it would work for me. You will want to look the Dell manual for uninstalling the Dell heatsink if you are haven’t removed the heatsink before. There are two screws you will need to remove and then plastic case surrounding the heatsink, comes loose when you lift it up and back. Once you have the heatsink off, you might want to clean it off and apply a small amount of Arctic Silver to the new cpu. In all the upgrade took less than 20 minutes.

So far the differences in speed are apparent when launching applications, however if you have not upgraded the memory, you probably should do that too. With the 8GB of RAM and Dual 3.2GHz Opteron the server feels a lot more responsive than the stock configuration from Dell. You can get the memory relatively cheap from Shop.Kingston.com and cheap AM2 processors from Newegg.com.